Page 174 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

166 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Indicative of this sentiment is a paper by Gerald Hastings, published in
the journal Social Marketing Quarterly in 2003. The title of the paper,
“Social Marketers of the World Unite, You Have Nothing to Lose but Your
Shame,” is a play on the Marxist slogan, “Workers of the World Unite!”
Hastings, along with his colleagues in social marketing, have assumed that
capitalism is largely to blame for many of the inequities and infirmities
people face in their daily lives and that the “core marketing skill of behav-
ior change” (Hastings, 2003) at the disposal of the discipline can lead to
improvements in the social and health realms. For example, Hastings
(2003, p. 14) cited a figure that more than 50 percent of premature deaths
are attributable to lifestyle choices and behaviors, and if we could figure
out a way to inform people about the better options available to them—
such as nudging them into eating more fruits and vegetables (Pollard,
Kirk, & Cade, 2002)—we could realize significant reductions in prema-
ture mortality. But why stop there, at the level of health? Why not expand
into criminal justice, environmentalism, or indeed virtually any social is-
sue imaginable?
Hastings (2003) was quick to add that social marketing must confront
the sins of its father, namely, traditional marketing, because that was a sci-
ence devoted to the bald and unapologetic project of expanding capitalist
production and consumption by making products more attractive to poten-
tial customers. Marketing discovered the principles of behavior change—
borrowed, of course, largely from psychology and sociology—but the trick
for social marketing is to transfer these principles from the commercial
realm to the social realm. When the transition is made from the world of
commerce to the world of everyday living and its attendant concerns over
health, safety, security, and well-being, then social marketing’s unmistaka-
ble critical agenda comes into focus. Where traditional marketing cozied
up to the corridors of corporate power, social marketing is concerned with
ameliorating the damaged and fractured lives of the less powerful and the
oppressed. Hastings listed some of the areas implied by a critical marketing
approach, including sustainability, ethics, gender issues, discourse analysis,
and postmodernism (p. 17). Corporations are seen, at best, as ethically
suspect for the way they work to channel desire in the populace (Ewen &
Ewen, 1992). This sentiment is consistent with the assumption that
health—like everything else in human society—is shot through with poli-
tics. Evaluative theorists of the Marxist bent make everything out to be
political, because if it is political, it is amenable to legislative enactment or
intervention, thereby making it an aspect of state administration and simul-
taneously removing it from the realms of everyday life, business, and the
free market (see Bambra, Fox, & Scott-Samuel, 2005).